Culver's Deluxe Vs Butterburger: The Difference Between The Menu Items

Culver's is a chain of fast food burger restaurants that got its start in Sauk City, Wisconsin. Besides priding itself on its customer service, it's also dedicated to promoting the Badger State's food culture with regional specialties, like cheese curds and frozen custard, along with the product that gave the state its other nickname: dairy! The burger chain not only adds real Wisconsin cheese to its burgers and includes it in its cheese sauce, but it also features butter in its beefy sandwiches. In fact, ButterBurgers are what Culver's specializes in, and it's the chain's buttered, toasted buns that make its sandwiches so unique and a cult favorite beyond the Upper Midwest.

All burgers at Culver's are ButterBurgers, even if specific sandwiches don't include the word in their names. As such, the Culver's Deluxe is simply a ButterBurger with more toppings than a standard ButterBurger, which merely features meat on a buttered, toasted Kaiser bun. Nevertheless, the chain does let you modify almost any sandwich to resemble a Culver's Deluxe, and there are even some hacks for creating a truly elevated burger order if you ask employees nicely. But there is a little more to know about these buttery burgers, how Culver's came to make them, and why the Culver's Deluxe exists.

Butter burgers (two words) aren't unique to Culver's and exist all over the Dairy State, but the burger chain makes a simplified version of the original. While Culver's opened its first location in 1984, this regional specialty was actually invented nearly 50 years earlier, in the 1930s, and can be traced back to Kroll's and Solly's Grille, two restaurants that claim to be the birthplace of the butter burger and are still in operation today.

The original preparation required topping each beef patty with a pat of butter while it cooked, allowing it to soak into the meat and create a rich, tender burger. Other cooks tweaked the recipe, opting to fry the meat in butter, add pats of butter to the finished burgers, and/or toast the buns in the rich, golden fat. It was Craig Culver's mother's technique of buttering only the buns that inspired the chain's famous ButterBurgers, and that deviation from tradition may explain why the chain combined the dairy and the beef into one trademarked word: ButterBurger.

Ordering one at Culver's gives you an unobstructed taste of the patty's combination of chuck, sirloin, and plate, along with the rich, creamy Wisconsin butter on its buns. Many promotional photos show the burger dressed with pickles, raw onions, ketchup, and mustard, a combination of toppings known as "the works" that exists in one form or another at various independent butter burger establishments throughout the state. However, you won't see any preloaded toppings when ordering online, because a ButterBurger is a starting point for customization.

Wisconsin has a reputation for nice people, and nice people don't dictate how you should eat your ButterBurger. As such, you can always make your Culver's order look different from how it appears in the picture. 

The Culver's Deluxe is simply a ButterBurger with one slice of cheese for each patty, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, pickles, and mayonnaise, and you can add these same toppings to a ButterBurger with cheese for the same price. This particular combination of ingredients is actually co-founder Craig Culver's go-to order at his restaurant, along with a small drink and a side of crinkle-cut fries (pro tip: Order them "extra crispy" to prevent sogginess). Perhaps that's why it became its own menu item. In short, a ButterBurger isn't defined by its toppings, but by the butter on its buns, at least at Culver's.